As you may have guessed, the team I am talking about is the Philadelphia Phillies. Since their legendary comeback in 2007 to win the National League Eastern Division, this Phillies team has completely turned around the mentality of a franchise best known before then for becoming the first professional sports team to reach 10,000 losses. Now they can also boast of being the second team in major league history with a pitcher to throw a no-hitter in the postseason. Yes, I wrote most of this article before Halladay’s gem.
This fame for losing is not undeserved — losing 10,000 games requires a constant ineptitude that is hard to fathom. The Phillies have been around since 1883, and for much of that period they have been flat-out awful. The Phillies’ entry on Wikipedia says — quite nicely, I might add — in its opening paragraphs that “The franchise has experienced long periods of struggle” and that the team has a “history of adversity” — euphemisms for the Phillies’ atrocious history.
From 1918 to 1948, the Phillies had one winning season, a 78-76 year in 1932, one island of mediocrity in a sea of putridity. Those 30 years include 12 100-loss seasons — five of which came in a row from 1938 to 1942. Their best pitcher, Hugh Mulcahy, was nicknamed “Losing Pitcher” because his name appeared under the loss column so often. Even today’s most hopeless franchise, the Pittsburgh Pirates, do not come close to this historic 30-year reign of rotten play. This must be one of the “long periods of struggle” that Wikipedia is talking about.
Yes, the Phillies won a championship in 1980, but apart from an amazing run to the World Series in 1993, culminating in Joe Carter’s (in)famous walk-off home run, they soon declined into mediocrity again. The franchise’s mentality was still one of a losing club, and as the team began to improve again in the early 2000s, it never seemed to have the moxie or elan necessary to succeed in September and October. In 2005, the Phillies finished one game out of the wild card; in 2006, they briefly took a one-game lead in the wild card during the last week of the season but faded down the stretch.
This is what makes the past four years even more impressive, as the Phillies have evolved from a team afraid to face good competition to a team with a swagger that intimidates its competition. Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Shane Victorino, Jayson Werth, Cole Hamels and, this year, Roy Halladay and Placido Polanco have turned the Phillies franchise into the most feared team in the National League. In the past three years, the Phillies have gone from eternally falling just short in September (or much earlier in the year) to the kings of the stretch run.
Great, you say, another Phillies fan bragging about his team.
Yes, to some extent I am bragging, but that is not my main point. The point is that I — and all other Phillies fans — finally understand what it’s like to root for a truly great team. It is really an honor and a joy to be able to watch this team. It must be similar to what it was like to root for legendary teams like the 1970s Cincinnati Reds (the Yankees don’t really count, since they’ve been so good so many times). This feeling is something that I, having now experienced it myself, think that every true sports fan should share at some time in their life — except for Mets fans, of course.
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